I had to hurry to get to the bank yesterday in order to keep
a check from bouncing.
Walking down Bergenline Avenue reminded me of life in
Paterson and Passaic, especially Passaic, when I often had to hurry up from my
apartment on 8th Street to get to the bank for similar reasons.
Bergenline Avenue is a bubble in time, a throw back to a
time before cell phones and the internet, although there were plenty of
pedestrians staring down into their tiny screens along the sidewalk, and plenty
of scooters darting in between.
I miss living in Passaic, although I never imagined I would
feel that way when I actually lived there all so many years ago, the
simplicity, being poor and yet happier than having so many things on my
shoulders that I carry around these days, Atlas with a world of troubles.
I went back to Passaic a few weeks ago, touring that portion
where I lived when I lived uptown, crossing over along Paulison Avenue, all the
way into Clifton, passed places that have significance only in memory such as
the Clifton Auto store, where we – Louis, Pauly, Garrick, Hank and me – got a
flat tire on Christmas Eve when Hank was driving us to our usual Christmas Eve
destinations.
We were enthusiastic. We all leaped out of the car,
intending to quickly change the tire for the spare only to find that Hank had
never repaired the spare from the previous year’s Christmas eve flat tire.
A frustrated Garrick grabbed Hank’s hat and threw it in the
air, only to have it get hooked on the “N” in Clifton Auto. When he leaped up to
retrieve the hat, the hat came down but so did the “N”, which became a running
joke for years each time we passed the place because it remained “Clifto Auto.”
The location is still an auto shop, but no longer under that
name, and ironically another business opened a block or so away that specialized
in repairing flat tires.
I walked through that field of memories all the way into
Clifton to Clifton Avenue where the old Clifton Theater once stood, long ago
demolished to make way for a drug emporium, carrying away the memories of when
I worked there as an usher with Ralph – my friend from grammar school, with
whom we picked up and made out with girls in the dark corners of the theater.
Not only was the theater gone, but Ralph, also, passing away
some ten years ago in some remote corner of Pennsylvania. Hank passed away long
before that. Pauly more recently, and so my walk through that place and back
along Lexington Avenue to Passaic again was through a graveyard of ghosts – the
concrete Weasel Brook Park paved over for development, the Fine Arts Theater
(full of its dirty movies as far back as the 1950s) turned into a adult video
and book store, and the Capital Theater – with is classic strip tease and rock
and roll venue – a parking lot for a Burger King, and the Montauk Theater – the
last of the XXX shops along with the Palace Strip Club leveled to make way for
a new school.
Still, enough of old Passaic remained, stores lining two
sides of Main Avenue that looked pretty much the same as when I lived there,
and the people – as with Bergenline – much the same, clutching cell phones and
shopping bags, even on Sunday, a long stroll through past and present, though
it is clear even that part of the world is changing, new luxury buildings
displacing the poor, just as they are on Bergenline, and you have to wonder,
where do all the poor go when all of the old places vanish?
